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The 8 Most Fascinating Things I Read This Week

Good reads, short quotes.

Happy Friday! There are more good news articles, commentaries, and analyst reports on the Web every week than anyone could read in a month. Here are the eight most fascinating ones I read this week.

1. The world's superpower(s)Catherine Rampell of TheNew York Timespoints out a survey from Pew Research Center asking people around the world whom they consider to be the world's leading economic power:

Country

U.S. (%)

China (%)

Japan (%)

EU (%)

Other (%)

U.S.

40

41

6

5

8

Britain

28

28

5

3

7

France

29

54

7

6

0

Germany

13

62

5

17

3

Spain

26

57

9

5

3

Italy

37

46

8

3

6

Greece

36

45

7

3

10

Poland

35

35

12

4

13

Czech Rep.

29

51

9

7

5

Russia

26

33

17

7

18

Turkey

54

22

6

8

10

Egypt

40

39

11

7

3

Jordan

36

44

16

4

0

Lebanon

34

44

5

5

12

Tunisia

48

29

7

5

11

Pakistan

48

27

4

1

20

China

48

29

2

5

15

India

37

17

7

1

38

Japan

45

43

3

5

5

Brazil

45

27

15

3

10

Mexico

51

18

12

6

12

2. Green shootsIf you've followed economic pundits over the last few years, you've heard of David Rosenberg. He's a Canadian economist who's been resolutely bearish -- sometimes apocalyptically bearish -- to an almost humorous extent. Now he's changing his tune, according toTheWall Street Journal:

Is Mr. Rosenberg defecting from the dark side? Not quite yet, he says. But he maintains he now is more optimistic than he has been in more than a decade. ...

Mr. Rosenberg says his newfound optimism was crystallized by the votes last week in Wisconsin and California. He sees those representing a sea change in the way state and local governments are addressing their fiscal problems, and expects that attitude will sweep across statehouses and eventually filter up to the national level. ...

All of this leads him to believe the next 15 years or so won't be like the past 12 or so. Anybody who tries to project the future based on the immediate past is making a mistake of "gargantuan" proportions, he says.

3. Who's buying our debt?Some insist that the only reason interest rates are so low is because the Federal Reserve is overwhelming the market with Treasury purchases. Jeff Cox of CNBC points out that there's another side to the story:

The demand among average investors has swelled so much, in fact, that they bought more Treasurys in the first quarter than foreigners and the Fed combined.

Households picked up about $170 billion in the low-yielding government debt during the quarter, while foreigners increased their holdings by $110 billion.

The Fed, meanwhile, actually slightly decreased its net holdings, not a surprise since its latest quantitative easing endeavor begun in September -- nicknamed Operation Twist -- was designed to be balance sheet-neutral.

4. More on bond buyersWhat kind of idiot would buy Treasuries that yield 0%? Jason Zweig of TheWall Street Journaldescribes buyers who are rationally indifferent to price:

Under the Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law, the trading of many derivatives -- complex instruments like interest rate swaps -- will eventually migrate to central "clearinghouses." Buyers and sellers will have to post "margin," or collateral, to back their positions. One obvious choice for that margin would be U.S. Treasurys -- yet another form of the artificial demand for government debt ...

Such derivatives total an estimated $700 trillion in "notional" or face value outstanding. If only 10% of the total is affected, with an initial requirement of even just 1% margin from both the buyers and the sellers, that implies an extra $1.4 trillion in demand for short-term Treasurys, reckons [Todd Petzel, chief investment officer at Offit Capital]. Those new purchasers would have to buy the debt no matter how paltry its yield.

A derivatives trader at one of the world's largest hedge funds tells me that he finds Mr. Petzel's estimate "quite believable" -- if not conservative.

5. On legacyFamed author Malcolm Gladwell adds a twist to the Microsoft(Nasdaq: MSFT) vs. Apple(Nasdaq: APPL) rivalry. Business Insiderquotes him as saying:

"[Bill] Gates is the most ruthless capitalist, and then he wakes up one morning and he says, 'enough.' And he steps down, he takes his money, he takes it off the table.

"I firmly believe that 50 years from now, he will be remembered for his charitable work, no one will even remember what Microsoft is.

"And of the great entrepreneurs of this era people will have forgotten Steve Jobs. Who's Steve Jobs again? There will be statues of Gates across the third world."

The data we can see is scary, but it's our blind spots that are truly terrifying. Here's just one example: Big institutions such as Bank of America [(NYSE: BAC)] have bought and sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of credit default swaps -- the same highly combustible financial derivatives that were at the heart of the 2008 financial collapse -- tied to European debt. The banks would argue that all those swaps, which pay off when the underlying asset goes bad, balance out safely. But that's a bit like saying you've built the sturdiest-possible Jenga tower. As the aftermath of Lehman Brothers showed, that sort of delicately calibrated trading strategy can fall apart disastrously if, say, a major bank goes bust and can't pay everyone else who bought swaps from them.

7. "Why smart people are stupid"Jonah Lehrer writes a fascinating piece in TheNew Yorker about the cognitive failures of really smart people:

The scientists gave the students four measures of "cognitive sophistication." As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, "indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots." This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes.

8. Worst birthday everIs it your birthday today? Happy birthday! Now go hide. According to the Annals of Epidemiology, you are 13.8% more likely to die on your birthday than other days, "mainly because of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases (more in women than in men) as well as suicides and accidents (in particular, falls in men)," the study writes.